Crossbow choice math

[game5551]

I was curious which crossbow to use so I tested light repeater vs great crossbow. A link to a spreadsheet with the math and an explanation are below. I should add that this artificer is my first ranged combat character ever.

For my math, this is what I found:
The great crossbow fires significantly fewer bolts in a minute than a repeater. Anything that increases damage per bolt favors the repeater. Without insightful damage or any other bonuses, the great crossbow will do more damage. With insightful damage or other bonuses, the repeater will do more damage, even if it is in point blank range.

Link to Math:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...hl=en_US#gid=0

Explanation:
I used the crossbows from the first beach quest reward and the collaborator reward to test, but for damage calculations used the base item damage (so no extra damage from flame touch or keen). I am a level 3 artificer with rapid reload and rapid shot. A couple of assumptions I made: Int bonus from insightful damage and the extra dice from point blank shot are multiplied on a critical, the int bonus was set at +6, Fort is 0%.

How I found attack rate: Started stopwatch as fired first bolt. For the click and hold rate I just held the mouse button down for the minute and counted the fired bolts. For the click attack I would click to fire as soon as the reload animation was completed. I probably did not time all bolts perfectly, so probably not the maximum rate of fire, but hopefully within 10%.

If you see any problems with my math please let me know and I will edit post.

[jjflanigan]

I haven't looked at your spreadsheet yet, however I have a question:

If you are disregarding the bonus damage from flaming and such wouldn't that have a huge impact on the numbers?

All things being equal say you have 2 weapons:

Flaming Burst Repeating of Pure Good
Flaming Burst Great of Pure Good

The fact that you get the Flaming + Pure good damage a significant larger number of times with the repeater I would imagine that would push the repeater above the great crossbow even without insightful damage?

[JeffreyGator]

I think that you are missing a lot of factors that increase damage per bolt.
I suspect past level 4 or so everyone should figure out how to have the following things added:
1) Rune Arm Imbue damage (from 1-2 force to 2d4 acid)
2) d6 elemental weapons damage (note that I have been using lightning mostly and haven't seen how this stacks with the existing type of damage)
3) Crafted/found damaging prefix (holy, acid, etc)
4) Crafted/found damaging suffix (pure good, bleeding, good burst, elemental burst for GS)
5) Risia Frost or Icy for found weapons.

Having had a repeater toon earlier. I have things like Frost paralyzer of Pure Good and icy burst holy burst repeater of puncturing.

So Lit II with a rune arm gives:
GCB 15.5 + 7 + 3.5 + 5 + 3.5 + int + .3 * (15.5 + 5.5 + int) + .05 * 500 (lumping lightning strike and elemental blast together)
LRCB 10.5 + 7 + 3.5 + 5 + 3.5 + int + .2 * (10.5 + 5.5 + int) + .05 * 500


If you change out deadly strikes for elemental weapons and are at point blank this changes to:
GCB 45.5 + 7 + 3.5 + 5 + int + .3 * (45.5 + 5.5 + int) + .05 * 500
LRCB 31.5 + 7 + 3.5 + 5 + int + .2 * (31.5 + 5.5 + int) + .05 * 500

[SirAppleheart]

Sorry for sorta cross-posting here, but has any calculation been done about Light Repeater vs Heavy Repeater? Eladrin's posts did seem to suggest that with the latest build there should be a difference in reload time between the two, and for the same reason that repeaters have been mentioned above to end up higher in DPS due to increased firing rate over a great crossbow it'd make sense that light repeaters would also beat heavy repeaters. I have however not had the chance to actually test this, so at the moment that assumption is just that, an assumption.

[game5551]

I haven't looked at your spreadsheet yet, however I have a question:

If you are disregarding the bonus damage from flaming and such wouldn't that have a huge impact on the numbers?

All things being equal say you have 2 weapons:

Flaming Burst Repeating of Pure Good
Flaming Burst Great of Pure Good

The fact that you get the Flaming + Pure good damage a significant larger number of times with the repeater I would imagine that would push the repeater above the great crossbow even without insightful damage?

Well, as I said, "Anything that increases damage per bolt favors the repeater." I just wanted to get a baseline as there are a lot of different things that could be added, and I wanted to have an idea of what weapon to shoot for when they go live (AH prices are low, can pick up some good deals now before arti flood the game pushing up demand). Yes, it seems that repeaters are way above great crossbows.

Edited op to add in bonuses to great crossbow conclusion. It was rather poorly worded. As I plan to be running with insightful damage on, I was overlooking other situations since insightful damage was all it took to push the repeating crossbow to the front.

[game5551]

Sorry for sorta cross-posting here, but has any calculation been done about Light Repeater vs Heavy Repeater? Eladrin's posts did seem to suggest that with the latest build there should be a difference in reload time between the two, and for the same reason that repeaters have been mentioned above to end up higher in DPS due to increased firing rate over a great crossbow it'd make sense that light repeaters would also beat heavy repeaters. I have however not had the chance to actually test this, so at the moment that assumption is just that, an assumption.

Well, I think the pattern is that any increase in attack speed is preferable to increase in base damage. If I can find a heavy repeater for cheep I will check it out.

- Edit -
So I tested the heavy repeating crossbow at:
Click and hold: 87 shots/min (-3.33% vs light repeating)
Click to fire: 138 shots/min (-4.17% vs light repeating)
The heavy repeater has same crit profile, and does 1 average damage more a shot. I think those attack rates are similiar enough that the extra damage a shot will win out, but not sure and too tired to think about it now.

[JeffreyGator]

If you were to greensteel the hvy is 3.5 pts per shot better and so that might even out the differences.